


Panacea Never Punched So Hard

by pibroch (littleblackdog)



Category: Saints Row
Genre: Alcohol, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Guns, Implied Drinking and Driving, Murder, Smoking, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-13
Updated: 2014-05-13
Packaged: 2018-01-24 13:26:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1606757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleblackdog/pseuds/pibroch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>They were both hanging around a goddamn hospital parking lot in the middle of the night, and there was only one reason.</em>
</p><p>After things go south with the Ronin, Troy and <a href="http://pibroch.tumblr.com/tagged/boss%3Aleonie">Leonie</a> have a chat.  Mid-SR2.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Panacea Never Punched So Hard

**Author's Note:**

> Diving into SR with both feet, and I'm not sure I'm coming up for air. In the meantime, have a little Troy-centric sort of thing.

It was after dark in Stilwater, and Troy knew he was probably playing with fire, sitting in plain clothes in a shadowy corner of a parking lot, with the keys in the ignition and his windows rolled down, but fuck it. It was a warm night, without enough breeze blowing in to chase off the humidity or the city stench, and he didn’t feel like getting hassled by hospital security for hotboxing with Marlboros. The radio was murmuring low, some Top 40s shit, just loud enough to keep him company better than his thoughts would.

His lighter was on the dash where he’d tossed it earlier; the flame was weirdly bright, throwing stark, black shapes into every corner of car’s interior, dancing and flickering until he snapped the lid closed again. The cherry of his cigarette was better for his mood, glowing dimmer, and red as blood when he took a deep drag.

He’d parked out of the way of the streetlights, around the side of the lot— inconspicuous, inoffensive, but with a good view of the front doors. Just a couple of hours of watching, after he’d gotten home from the office, showered off the oily feeling pressing palms and greasing wheels always left on his skin, and found himself back in the car before he could think better of it. A few hours, and a bland chicken sub from some sandwich place between his apartment and the hospital, the balled up wrapper of which was still stinking up his backseat.

Even just a couple of years stuck behind a desk, and he could already feel his arteries hardening. He outright refused to die from a Freckle Bitch’s induced heart attack— it was such a cliche, for one thing, and fucking boring too.

Just a regular, run of the mill heart attack seemed entirely possible, however, when he leaned back in his seat, exhaling a long plume of smoke, and felt the cool kiss of a gun barrel touch his temple.

“Oh hey, Troy.”

“ _Fuck_.” He didn’t scramble away, opting to freeze instead. Beside him, Leonie Baral bent down to look in his open window, pressing a gun against his skull, but Troy took some comfort in the fact that if she wanted him dead that minute, she probably would have already painted the upholstery with his brains.

 _Probably_.  Granted, it had been a couple of fucked up years since they’d spoken properly, and a coma. People changed.

“Jesus, you’re getting slow.” She knocked against his cheek with the piece, an NR4 from what he could see out of the corner of his eye, not nearly hard enough to do any damage. She’d probably killed a cop for it, and Troy wondered if he’d known its former owner. Stilwater PD had gone through more officers in the months since Leonie Baral had woken up in the prison’s medical ward than they usually lost in two years. It was war on the goddamn streets, but Troy would be the first to admit that the growing cohort of Saints-controlled hoods had largely calmed down, with less trouble than they’d ever had with the Ronin, Samedi, or the Brotherhood, even as the rest of the city tore itself apart.

Then, after one of the longest pauses of Troy’s life, Leonie drew the gun back, keeping it in her hand but pointed away. Without that terrible black muzzle bearing down on him, it was as if all the air in the world suddenly came rushing back, and Troy could breathe again, desperate, deep, and ragged.

“Fuck,” he said again, quieter this time, but managed to gather his shit back together in what he considered impressive time, considering he’d just had a gun to his head. “If you’re going to cap me, can I at least finish my smoke first? I just lit this thing.”

Thankfully, by the grace of some bizarre god, Lee actually laughed. The sound was bright, silvery, and seemed genuinely amused.

She’d always thought he was funny.

“Those things’ll kill you, you know.” She leaned further in, one elbow braced against the car door, and Troy considered his own sidearm, secure in the shoulder holster hidden under his thin track jacket, and the spare strapped to his ankle. In these close quarters, he doubted he’d be able to effectively put hands on either before she landed a shot or two, and at this range she’d only need one, but he’d give it his all if worse came to worst.

“And hell, I might just give them the chance,” she continued, and finally, Troy turned to look at her properly. He’d been too busy keeping his eyes on the gun and not making any sudden moves.

She looked different— her hair was shorter, definitely, but there was something else, too. Something hard in her eyes that hadn’t been there before, a tightness at the corners. She looked meaner, like she’d been whittled down to all her sharper edges, though she wasn’t any leaner. If anything, she’d bulked up, broader in the shoulders and back, and her arms corded with thicker muscle than he remembered.

It was easier to take note of all those changes now that they were face to face, instead of just watching her wreaking havoc in grainy security videos. Easier, especially with her leaning against his car, dressed down to a thin black tank top. The floral sleeve winding along her left arm was bigger than ever, with brighter ink farther down past her elbow. Fresh, and better work than the earlier scratch up to her shoulder, but that older stuff looked touched up too, neater than before. A riot of colours, washing out the lingering pinkness of scars that Troy knew were layered underneath.

Her right arm was bandaged above the elbow, wrapped clumsily with a few spots of red seeping through, but at least it had been done with gauze and tape instead of a torn up shirt or whatever else she might have had on hand.

She certainly wasn’t the fresh-faced kid who’d followed him and Julius home, with split knuckles and blood on her teeth in the churchyard. Cocky as hell for some no-name chick just rolled into town off a bus, but earning it with every job gone right.

There was still cockiness there, in the lift of her brows and the cant of her hips, but it wasn’t the same. Maybe someone else might not have noticed, but Troy had been undercover for a long time, and that required skills to read people quickly, and well enough to stay alive. And, besides that, he’d rolled with Lee long enough to spot the difference. She hadn’t _lost_ her confidence, but it was bruised for sure, more than her body had been after her canonization. More than she’d been after the boat explosion, even, when she’d been a patchwork of black and blue and angry, ugly red in big whorls up her left side from the burns, laid out and barely alive on stark white sheets, handcuffed to the hospital bed.

“Hey, so, I’m coming around.” She motioned with her empty hand, towards the windshield. “Because my ass hanging out your window looks like you’re picking up parking lot pussy, and I’d hate to land you in that sort of trouble, _Chief_.”

He’d expected her to spit the title when she said it, as if it left the same sour bile taste in her mouth that it put in his on the bad days, but her tone wasn’t that poisonous. Sharper, sure, but with more annoyance than anything approaching the rage he’d braced himself to suffer. He’d heard her sound more homicidal about being cut off in traffic.

“All fucking around aside, man.” She straightened up, and the gun disappeared into the waistband of her jeans, tucked between the small of her back, and the dark purple track jacket she had tied around her hips. “I’m planning on playing nice tonight. You can take off if you want, I don’t give a shit, but you try to run me over, and I’m gonna be pissed, alright?”

It was the perfect opportunity for him to get the hell out of there, or even better, to draw his own weapon and collar a wanted fugitive, armed, at large, and dangerous. Lee hadn’t waited for his answer, already walking in front of the car, and she wasn’t even bothering to keep her eyes trained on him the way he was watching her. It should have been insulting to be so utterly dismissed as a threat by some swaggering gangbanger with delusions of invulnerability, but if he was being entirely honest, Troy was a bit relieved that he wasn’t being pinned by her attention.

She reached in through the passenger side window and unlocked the door herself, then slid into the seat beside him. Her breath grunted out as she sprawled heavily, pained but quiet, and Troy wondered if there were more bandages under her clothes. More tattoos, almost definitely.

And then he immediately shut that line of thought down, taking a long drag of his smoke and forcing himself not to even glance at the sheen of sweat frosted over her bare collarbones. Her skin looked like old gold in the shadows of the car and the faint lights illuminating the outside of the hospital. Old, unpolished gold, tarnished but still warm.

He was so fucked up. So _entirely_ fucked up, from the job and all the shit that went with it, his grey, empty apartment, the weight of the badge pinned over his heart everyday like an anchor, and Vogel’s slimy fucking voice hissing through his phone. The people he still counted as his _friends_ even if they hated his guts were murders, cop killers, fucking gangbangers, and he didn’t blame them for wanting him dead after everything. Some days he wanted himself dead, which was a whole other pile of shit he didn’t want to linger on at the moment.

He was the worst cop on the fucking planet, and Troy understood better than most that he had some stiff competition for that title. It would have been funny if it wasn’t his life.

His throat clicked when he swallowed, and his voice was too dry to pretend he wasn’t rasping, but he asked anyway. “How’s Johnny?”

It was a win, he decided, when he wasn’t immediately treated to a broken nose. He didn’t have the vaguest guess how Lee would react to him bringing it up, but shit, they were both hanging around a goddamn hospital parking lot in the middle of the night, and there was only one reason.

She didn’t punch him, but she did cut him a sideways look, long fingers laced behind her head.

“Alive but perforated, last I heard.” Lee stretched, sliding farther down in her seat, and let her attention flicker back towards the hulking shape of Stilwater Memorial. Her profile cleaved more severely in the dark than its usual blunted angles, and a few pieces of short, inky black hair stuck to her forehead. “Haven’t been in to see him yet, not since I dragged his ass here in the first place. Somebody would’ve called me if things went south.”

That wasn’t what Troy had expected to hear— Johnny had been brought in days ago, nearly a week, impaled through the abdomen, bleeding out. She hadn’t even checked in since? It had been touch and go for a while, and if Johnny Gat was slightly less of a ridiculously, impossibly tough motherfucker, the Saints would be burying him next to Eesh.

Though on paper, Johnny Gat wasn’t the one who’d just had his guts stitched back together. According to hospital records, an unidentified Asian male had been brought in to Stilwater Memorial, by an equally unidentified Asian woman, her face clearly caught by several security cameras on the way, holding tight to the side of the stretcher, then onto her phone, with the front of her button-up shirt and the thighs of her jeans stained dark with wide blooms of too much blood.

Both of them _unidentified_ and staying that way, after Troy had called in the right favours and twisted a couple arms. There wasn’t much he could do after what he’d seen at that house in the suburbs, but he could at least make sure Johnny didn’t end up having to break out of jail again before he buried his girl.

“Had some things to take care of,” Lee explained after a minute or two, and Troy considered the paperwork still piled on his desk, outlining the _incident_ at the airport. He wondered if there would be more reports in the morning, stacking higher and higher as the streets were being painted, first with blood then with purple, and decided he’d rather not know ahead of time.

“Way past visiting hours, now,” he said, only half-joking. He hoped she wasn’t going to bust in, but who knew? It wasn’t like a couple of security guards were going to keep her out.

“Yeah.” She didn’t sound as though she was accepting a dare, nor did she make a move to get out of the car, which were both good signs. “But I was in the neighbourhood. Didn’t even mean to stop long, ‘til I noticed this piece of shit.”

She didn’t clarify whether she meant the car or him, and Troy didn’t ask.

“What the hell are you doing here, Troy?”

That was the question of the hour, wasn’t it? Tapping ashes out the window, Troy rubbed his hand over his eyes, trying to banish the gritty, disgusting feel of them without much success.

“Not a fucking clue,” he said, after testing and rejecting a handful of babbling excuses disguised as answers. “If I figure it out, I’ll let you know. Wanna smoke?”

“Yeah, why not.” Another perfect opportunity, the chance to grab his sidearm with the least amount of suspicion, but Troy just reached in and pulled the pack of smokes out of his coat pocket. Lee grabbed his lighter off the dash without even asking, and the little gold studs in her nose and her eyebrow glinted when the flame flared to life. She certainly hadn’t wasted time getting more needles stuck through her face— the doctors hadn’t cared about her old piercings closing up during the coma, more concerned with keeping her flesh healing and her heart beating. Her ears were already covered in rings again, like before, but the eyebrow was new.

They sat, and smoked, and neither of them spoke. The parking lot was dead, and the only movement around the hospital doors was a single guard, ambling away for a cigarette of his own out on the sidewalk.

Eventually, Troy was nearly down to the filter, and stubbed out in the ashtray. He’d cut back enough that he wasn’t chain smoking anymore, not even with Leonie Baral in his goddamn car.

Lee flicked her own smoke out the window shortly thereafter, sending it pinwheeling into the night, and Troy very nearly warned her against littering, just to see what she’d say. In the end, though, he just watched her exhale the last bit of smoke out her nose.

“Went to your office a while back.” The smoke lingered, wreathing her face, but her eyes were still dark and gleaming through the cloud. Narrowed, staring at him, and Troy stared right back. “You weren’t there, so I dug around. That’s a fucked up statue thing, in the corner.”

He was going to strangle somebody— whatever moron let the fucking boss of the Third Street Saints wander around the Station, Troy was going to punch them in the fucking throat. _Goddamn_.

“You gotta be going crazy in there. All beige, and blue, and bullshit.” Lee smiled, with just a hint of teeth, looking significantly less like the devil herself now that the last wisps of her cigarette were clearing out. “I’m glad you weren’t there, man. Mood I was in, pretty sure I would’ve put a bullet in you, and I’m losing too many friends to be picky anymore.”

Jesus Christ, what did that even mean?

Well, apparently, it meant Troy was getting a cuff to the side of the head, open-palmed and shockingly playful.

“Ah, fuck—” He ducked, jerking away when she actually _ruffled his hair_. “What? The fuck, Lee?”

“We’re cool, you asshole.” Oh, Jesus. “I mean, you and me, we’re cool. Johnny probably still wants to waste your lily ass, but he’ll get over that shit.”

Troy blinked, carding his fingers back where Lee’s screwing around had left his scalp tingling.

“You and me,” he repeated. The mayo on that damn sub must have been off, and he was imagining things while the salmonella kicked in. He couldn’t be hearing what she was saying. “We’re _cool_?”

Slouching down in her seat again, Lee shrugged.

“Yeah. Reasonably cool.” Her head lolled over, looking up at him, and she bent in half enough to get one foot braced up on the dash. “We’d be cooler if you’d shave that gross ‘stache, though, or grow it out again. You look like you’re sixty years old, and doing bad porn. Cheap, nasty, old man porn. Some gay leather shit, maybe— but not the hot stuff.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He stopped himself from rubbing his upper lip. It wasn’t that bad; Lee was just being a dick. He wasn’t allowed to have a beard now that he was off undercover work, anyway, and if he went entirely clean-shaven his face looked like a bowl of oatmeal. “At least I don’t look fourteen and pissed off, with a damn _eyebrow ring_.”

“Hey, shut up.” Now, she did actually punch him, but just in the arm, and not as hard as she could. It still hurt like a bitch. “I’m badass, and you know it.”

That was certainly true.

“All right, _badass_. Get your filthy fucking boot off my dashboard.” He was pressing his luck, almost definitely, but Troy had always had a bad habit of doing that. “And open up the glove compartment.”

The angle of Lee’s eyebrows dipped, suspicious, but she did shuffle up a bit, dropping her leg and popping the little door open. When she pulled the bottle out, the liquor looked nearly black in the dark interior of the car.

“Whiskey in the glove box?” She tilted the fifth at him, back and forth, but it was too full to slosh. “Seriously? What kind of cop are you?”

“The kind who drinks with gangbangers— what do you think?” Reaching out, Troy waggled his fingers. _Come-hither_. “It’s not illegal ‘til it’s open, so crack that thing already.”

“Troy, man, you are completely fucked.” Lee shook her head, smiling again, and she wasn’t saying anything Troy didn’t already know. The seal of the bottle cap snapped with a quick turn of her wrist. “I think I love it.”

 

* * *

 

The next morning, when the news came in that someone had sliced and diced a pack of Ronin right after the Kanto dinner rush the day before, Troy was actually surprised. Then, when word trickled in that a Ronin operation in the ‘burbs had gotten hit hard by the Saints hours later, quick and vicious in the middle of the night, Troy was glad for the hangover.

Without the pounding in his head, and the stink of gunpowder on the clothes he’d slept in, last night would probably have seemed more like a dream than anything else.

Taking out scumbags left and right in that rec centre, without worrying about the spin, the politics, or being buried in paperwork: that had been a goddamn thrill. An aching sort of release, like lancing a wound he hadn’t known he’d been dying from. And while he might have been having that same dream for years— getting shit done without all the red tape slowing him down— his subconscious had never put Leonie Baral at his back, swearing a blue streak and turning every motherfucker wearing yellow into ground chuck.

Then again, up until last night, he’d been fairly certain Lee would’ve be more than keen to cap _his_ ass in between slaughtering Ronin. Troy wasn’t usually so pleased to be proven wrong, but he’d swallow this one gladly.

He’d kept her busy, kept her from muscling her way into the hospital after midnight, buzzed and stubborn as shit, and in return she’d gotten his blood pumping harder than it had in way too fucking long. Not a bad trade, all things considered. Not a good excuse, but fuck it, he didn’t need one.

He didn’t bother blaming anything on the whiskey, but he did make sure he’d saved the number she’d tapped into his phone, now listed as just **B**.

 **B** for Baral— for _Badass_ if you asked her, sounding bold, and joking, and terrifyingly sincere all at once.

 **B** for Boss, but Troy didn’t dare think that way, not for a hot minute. There were lines, and if he was going to start crossing some of them, he couldn’t afford to get the rest muddled up.

 **B** was simple, straightforward, and day or night, **B** was the sort of call he’d be happy to take.


End file.
